2005-05-29

"Many assaults are impulsive, often triggered by alcohol or misuse of other drugs, and the long pointed kitchen knife is an easily available, potentially lethal weapon, particularly in the domestic setting" - Dr Emma Hern, writing in British Medical Journal

Doctors in Scotland are seeking a ban on long kitchen knives. Saying they serve no purpose in the kitchen, they are the weapon of choice on the streets, used in half the stabbings seen in emergency rooms each year.

"Kitchen knives are designed for a purpose. It would be like asking a surgeon to perform an operation with a bread knife instead of a scalpel. Anything in the house like a cricket bat could be used as weapon in the hands of an idiot.

Chief Superintendent Tom Buchan, president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, has a practical consideration.

A ban on sharp, pointed kitchen knives would be welcome, but it could be difficult to enforce.

"You, you with the long, sharp knife carving the roast! You're under arrest!!!!!"

Raised in a household that was filled with differing opinions possessed by six different people all convinced they were right, I glommed on to Scott Berkun's Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas essay with the fervor of the righteous and defeated.

We all make mistakes. There are, however, varying degrees of admitting to this. An area where I make the most mistakes and yet make the most tiring stampedes on others wrongness is the English language.

Check out Common Errors in English here and have some of your own rightness/wrongness confirmed/denied.

It's all about DRM, then. Digital Rights Management. Installed into your computer if you get anything with the new Pentium D chip and accompanying 945 chip set. Listen to what Darknet has to say about it. And from PCWorld:

"The situation presents an interesting dilemma for IT security managers as they may now be beholden to hardware-embedded security over which they have little say, information or control.

Intel's reticence to speak publicly about what lies under the hood of its latest firmware technology has also prompted calls to come clean from IT security experts, including Queensland University of Technology's assistant dean for strategy and innovation, IT faculty, Bill Caelli.

'It's a dual-use technology. It's got uses and misuses. Intel has to answer what guarantees it is prepared to give that home users are safe from hackers. Not maybes, guarantees'.

Caelli said it was 'critical Intel comes clean' about how the current DRM technology is embedded into the new CPU and chipset offering.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment at press time."

Microsoft and Disney are a bit too big for their britches me thinks. Much like these cute kittens that are completely unrelated to this post:

2005-05-28

MTV, which is willing to show plenty of half naked women, bling bling and other cult of celebrity crap, is patently unwilling to show anything vaguely politcal.

They've forced NIN to drop out of a performance.

They were set to perform "The Hand That Feeds", which more than obliquely critcized the Irag war:

"What if this whole crusade's a charade,And behind it all there's a price to be paid,For the blood on which we dine,Justified in the name of the holy and the divine."MTV, in a statement, said that the network is "uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement."

This is the network that had Marilyn Manson and his prominent white ass all over the place, a network that wants to "Rock the Vote" and a network that glorifies the party culture.

They couldn't just also put on a band that loves Bush (is there one?) or have a statement on the screen stating that Trent's views are not the views of the very suited, corporate station. They told an artist, "No."

"NIN will not perform at the MTV move awards as previously announced. We were set to perform 'The Hand that Feeds' with an unmolested straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently the image of our President is as offensive to MTV as it is to me."

This sign should be outside my door and psychically transmitted to any who dare approach me when I write. The dribs and drabs writing goes on all the time. By this method I've finished numerous short stories and a book I've put on the shelf as I start another one.

But when in writing mode, similar to 'cleaning moods' but more private and a lot less clean, I am not always a happy rainbow companion. I get moody. Irritable. Cccccrrraaaabbbbyyyy.

When something must be written and worked at with focused attention or I'll go insane, I become the world's worst correspondent, friend, co-worker, friend, partner. Caught up with the movie in my head, all else fades away.

Despising the phone at the best of times, when writing it's worthy of a sledge hammer and little more. I like background noise but no direct contact with aforementioned noise.

When the stuff is out of my head, I'm fine. Delightful even (ha ha). But, until then, beware the vicious writer.

The last entry on ToTo247's (Simon Ng's) Xanga Site alludes to his sisters ex-boyfriend wandering in his apartment. The man later murdered Simon and his sister, Sharon. This post helped catch the killer.

2005-05-23

...that May is National Masturbation Month. It culminates on the 28th with National Masturbation Day. Some people have already celebrated in a less then legal way. Jumpsuits, baby powder and public transportation, oh my! It seems Brits will be able to celebrate the best as they are the ones that can celebrate the longest according to a new study.

When you've tuckered yourself out with that why not move on to the ever popular hobby of sausage sculpture? Your hands should be up to the task.

And now, it's back to mopping for me! Dirt and soap scum are verboten!

When I was a kid I would go into these moods my Mom would call 'Cleaning Moods'. Everything I came across, I would compulsively clean. To the extent of, for example, putting the towels in the bathroom in rainbow order. I would be cleaning one thing and noticing another thing needing to be cleaned.

This hasn't happened in a looooooooooong time.

Until this weekend. Almost robotically, I must clean things.

Luckily for me many things need to be cleaned. Kitchen and bathroom first, of course. Where one eats and then cleans oneself should be clean. Then, onto the insanity that is the Jordan abode. An obsessive compulsive's worst nightmare.

Pulling on the latex gloves, I am in my glory when I going into cleaning mode.

Ever been around a pregnant woman during her first trimester when she starts 'nesting'? I'm worse. Just give me a B complex, a high protein breakfast and a cup of coffee. I'll clean your whole house.

I must have been a well praised maid that died a tragic cleaning related death in a former life.

2005-05-19

I have no intention of going to see the latest Star Wars installment but I've read a few reviews. One in particular, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, amused the yak milk out of me:

"No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in Gremlins when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung.

At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink, squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. 

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose, he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you'd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger?

Also, while were here, whats with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. I hope right you are. Break me a fucking give."

2005-05-17

Kent Krueger is finally getting the attention he deserves for Blood Hollow. Seeing this book get an Anthony nomination fills me with glee. Read my gushing about the book here.

I've loved Kent's work since Iron Lake broke a long standing reading dry spell. Picking it up at one in the morning, I devoured it by five. Consumed it. Loooooved it.

Krueger writes characters readers become deeply involved with and the town of Aurora, Minnesota is itself one of the most compelling players. Krueger has managed to write what is in essence a police procedural that reads as continually fresh and engaging.

I'm lucky enough to have read Krueger's latest, Mercy Falls. Anyone who's followed the series and feels he took a chance with Blood Hollow will be blown away by Mercy Falls. And, damn, now I've got to wait for the next one.

Another one just finished and very much enjoyed was Rick Mofina's The Dying Hour. It's the first in a new series and, I'll be up front: there is a serial killer.

For many, the serial killer motif has been done to death, pun intended. What sucked me into the story and held my interest despite a warm, sunny day and the arrival of new music (the ultimate distraction) was the protagonist, Jason Wade.

A rookie reporter at the Seattle Mirror, with the proverbial chip on his shoulder, Wade by sheer determination and instinct happens upon a missing persons case that no one else has even looked over and dismissed. It's something only a rookie doing a night shift trying to make his bones would notice. But Wade makes a few calls, checks a few facts and has a story that is a made reporters wet dream.

This opens up a compelling array of journalistic mores - the strongest being what's more important, the story or the people in the story? Wade is forced to make decision that could have real impact on whether a woman lives or dies as the police struggle to track the killer.

I'll be writing a full review and fell any quick overview would make what for was an exceptional book sound less than that as I type past the midnight hour. This another author taking a chance that pays off when what could be so typical goes so far beyond mundane crime fiction.

I've just laid my hand son Ian McEwan's Saturday. His worked has served me well before by satisfactorily stuffing my brain and Atonement was used just days ago to kill a wasp that crawled on the wall perilously close to your hapless writer.

Last night, I was entranced with a sentence from Saturday that I'll share with you here:

In the lifeless cold, they pass through the night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible glow of consciousness - these engines devise their own tracks.

I was verily giggling with pleasure as I read it and read it aloud to myself in order to more fully enjoy it's sustained majesty. Neurosurgery, crime imminent war and the state of the world make excellent literary bedfellows.

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

The UCAWWW is calling for a ban of the internet in all American homes:

"We, the members of UCAWWW, petition that the Internet (World Wide Web) creates nothing but harm in society today. The Internet is a cause for addiction and sin while taking away traditional family values. Our children are being exposed to filth that causes sexual tendencies and drug addiction. We therefore, demand that the internet be permanently banned from American homes. We MUST restore faith in God and steer clear of the devil!"

This petition is available online. It was created/written by Gladis Haralski who has a hotmail address.

Of a recent visit with a doctor, Lindsay Lohan said, "He was like, 'Are you anorexic? Are you making yourself throw up? Are drugs involved?' And I was like, 'Are you saying this because you've read it in magazines? Because I don't!'"

The state of Hawaii has evicted a Maui woman from a lava tube she has called home, hot, home for the last three years. Karen Mayfield, 50, has pleaded innocent to three misdemeanor charges for illegal camping, disturbing a geological feature and littering. Her trial is scheduled to start May 31.

Mayfield said she isn't allowed to stay in the lava tube while her court case is pending.

"I really miss it out there," she said. "I really prefer living an alternate lifestyle where I can hear the wind blow and see the stars at night."

Dating creates a permanent endorphin-bond between two people who will not spend their lives together.

Dating teaches people to break off difficult relationships, conditioning them more for divorce than marriage.

Dating develops an appetite for variety and change, creating dissatisfaction within marriage. Dating lacks the protections and guidance afforded by parental involvement of courtship.Dating doesn't prepare children to face "life's realities."

Dating devalues sex and marriage.

Dating leads to intimacy but not necessarily to commitment.

Dating tends to skip the "friendship" stage of a relationship.

Dating often mistakes a physical relationship for love.

Dating often isolates a couple from other vital relationships.

Dating, in many cases, distracts young adults from their primary responsibility of preparing for the future.

Dating can cause discontentment with God's gift of singleness.

Dating creates an artificial environment for evaluating another person's character.

Lawmakers and urine tests. They go together like pesto and tattoos. But this unlikely pairing is made possible by ... the whizzinator.

The Whizzinator, a life-like prosthetic penis, helps illegal drug users pass urine tests. U.S. lawmakers want piss on the parade of manufacturers and have handed out subpoenas.

With the faux phallus, testers can provide a flow of clean urine "again and again, anytime, anywhere you need it!" according to the Web site www.whizzinator.com.

Actor Tom Sizemore, who played a sergeant in the war movie "Saving Private Ryan," was caught using the Whizzinator to pass drug tests. He was put in jail after using a similar device and failing a drug test.

2005-05-11

One minute to midnight, watching the end of Mythbusters (one of two television must see shows for me cuz those boys blow up a lot of stuff), the wind is not just blowing but GUSTING outside and I sit in my creaky, crappy computer chair scanning the internet so you don't have to.

The first bit 'o stuff to come to my attention was Larry Flynt on Bush's choice for the U.N. council, John Bolton. Or, more to the point, Flynt on Bolton's first wife. Yes. Ewwwwwww.

The next and most apt follow up, how to detect when someone is lying without a machine, truth serum, psychic powers or a truth smelling dog.

President Bush is soon expected to sign an $82 billion military spending bill that also gives funds to tsunami victims and money to support troops overseas. Hard to turn down. Let's look beyond the money and the military aspect of it to a little addendum in the bill.

This bill will, in part, create electronically readable, federally approved ID cards for Americans. The House of Representatives loves the idea and passed it last Thursday.

When Bush signs the bill, within three years of the signing, people that live or work in the United States will need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or to take advantage of nearly any government service. Essentially, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.

Of course this is all rationalized by the 'terrorist threat', an excuse for much of the laws that have passed since Bush took office. Said Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, the Real ID will "hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our society by requiring that all states require proof of lawful presence in the U.S. for their drivers' licenses to be accepted as identification for federal purposes such as boarding a commercial airplane, entering a federal building, or a nuclear power plant."

Only ID cards approved by Homeland Security can be accepted "for any official purpose" by the feds. You'll still get one through your state motor vehicle agency. But the identification process will be more rigorous.

The card will contain name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address on "common machine-readable technology." Homeland Security will be permitted to add additional requirements such as a fingerprint or retinal scan. It is possible, and purely up to Homeland Security, that a barcode will be added. Where ever you go, what ever you do, this barcode can track you.

In a system rife with identity theft and continual loss of freedom and privacy this is the scariest bill yet.

A statement from the ACLU says, "The federalization of drivers’ licenses, and the culling of all information into massive databases, creates a system ripe for identity theft. New standards could place our most private information - including photographs, address and social security numbers - into the hands of identity thieves. Worse still, an independent commission is currently studying the issue of license security, and, if enacted, Real ID would undermine their efforts.

The Real ID Act would also unnecessarily harm immigrants. Some asylum seekers will be forced to produce written corroboration of their persecution from those who persecuted them. The act would also eliminate, in some cases, the right of habeas corpus as an avenue for court review for the first time since the Civil War. Such an overhaul of immigration laws shouldn't be slipped into a funding bill for the military."

"I run up on stuff like these here -- coffins pushed up to the side, all open, foul odors coming out," said Sidney Clark, who'd been visiting his mother's grave. "I'm seeing coffins open, I'm seeing a lot of dirt that has been moved -- the coffins are not even 3 feet in the ground."

In Chicago, Staff from WMAQ-TV saw at least three wooden coffins sticking out of the dirt at Homewood Memorial Gardens. The plastic-shrouded bodies inside were clearly visible . Concrete burial vaults were clearly exposed as well.

On a hilltop, dozens of grave markers were askew and stacked in rows. Clark said for three years, he's been trying to find his mother's grave, to no avail."If she was living, if she could talk to me now, she'd be glad I'm doing this right here," he said.

The cemeteries side? Maintenance man Rudy Casillas said he's in the process of layering the area where Cook County morgue bodies are buried in pauper's graves and that the grave markers will be restored to the ground above. He also maintained that the coffins have only been exposed during that process."See, this is just erosion," Casillas said. "We have coyotes that come and just dig -- animals and stuff like that."

A beautiful, fluid and masterfully written novel. It takes what seems to be a simple act of murder in a dive bar called La Tortuga and builds, nuance by nuance, a group of characters and a series of events that are utterly real.

We look through the eyes of Kiko Vigil, as he is viciously murdered while sitting across from his lover, Lorraine Garza, the wife of a crime lord. Only a drifter, in a wheelchair, knocked over by the killer as he runs to his car with a struggling woman slung over his shoulder, has the answers everyone is looking for.

Danny Mora, or Moony as only his oldest friend knows him, is hired by Vigil's colleague to investigate the murder when the INS decides it would be better for time to swallow it hole. The deeper he gets into his investigation, the further he gets from the drifter and closer to a killer that puts all he knows and loves into mortal danger.

This book is a stand alone to Ramos' other books in his Luis Montez series. It's ending left me in shock, slack jawed at what had just happened. You could not find a higher standard of writing than the one found in this definitive work.

2005-05-09

A new policy that takes effect at DaimlerChrysler's Indiana Transmission Plant I and Plant II Monday has new blue lines painted on the parking lot and signs that declare "DaimlerChrysler Parking Only" and "DaimlerChrysler Vehicle Parking." 80% of the workers must park much further away if they drive a car or truck made by a competing manufacturer.

Workers that park non-Chrysler vehicles in the reserved areas will be towed to Indianapolis at a cost of $200.

Spent most of the week-end away from the dreaded computer chair and thus the computer.

Did not watch the news.

Really avoided all electronically related media devices.

And I was cheery. Cheery, baby!

I touch briefly into the Drudge Report and am so annoyed I close it in seconds. Not before I clicked on a fewinterestinglinks and slam down the one pop-up that makes it past Firefox.

I did, through dogged determination and caffeine fueled clicking, find other stuff for those I've left in a post free lurch.

For Dianne, Muppet News Central, a site you should no doubt bookmark, has this news. A book due out in September of Jim Henson's wisdom to be entitled, "It's Not Easy Being Green." This should cheer a chick so looking forward to A Muppet Wizard of Oz.

Because you know you've always wanted to know more about the great art of hand shadows, a fall back event for acid trips and bad blind dates, here is a site dedicated to the cause.

2005-05-06

The Russian leader points to what he believes are drawbacks to America's own brand of democracy, including the Electoral College system.

"In the United States, you first elect the electors and then they vote for the presidential candidates. In Russia, the president is elected through the direct vote of the whole population. That might be even more democratic," Putin says.

"And you have other problems in your elections. Four years ago your presidential election was decided by the court. The judicial system was brought into it. But we're not going to poke our noses into your democratic system because that's up to the American people."

Beautiful Agony offers you the best in MPEG's featuring the faces of those experiencing La Petite Mort. One woman looks as thought she's passing a kidney stone, but the others look quite... pleased. Download, enjoy, then head right back to Confession.

Gawd, dontcha love it when someone that knows you well says, "You've got to read these books," places them in your hands and you go off to cave and fall in love with another writer? For me, it's almost better than sex. Almost.

The latest obsession, the author whose books my paws have gripped so tightly for the past two days is Simon R. Green - the Nightside series. I've read them back to back, loathing the interruption of phone calls and foregoing sleep and food. I am well and truly under the spell of great writing.

The series lead, John Taylor, spent five years on the light side of London, trying to be a normal, down on his luck P.I. He'd fled the Nightside five years before, with a bullet in his back and a sense of his own mortality. But his birthplace, the Nightside, the flip side of London ruled by neither Heaven or Hell, pulls him back in. Back to peril, power and a destiny that could end his life and the existence of the Nightside itself.

Nothing is what it seems on the Nightside, and that includes John Taylor, champion of the down trodden and a P.I. that 'never let's a client down.' Whether that client is the distraught other of a runaway or Lady Luck herself. Taylor gets by on bravado, connections and an inheritance he hasn't come to terms with... he's the son of a human and a female of unknown origin that strikes fear into the strongest and most amoral of the Nightside's residents.

2005-05-02

You've no doubt read the words from the Blair memo that have spilled all over the news. What? Drudge thinks Paula Abdul is more important? Well, I'll tell you then.

"It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

"The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."

"In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day."

About Me

Referred to as everything from Satanspawn to "that weird chick" to friend of all elves, Jennifer Jordan is writing and reading her way to Nirvana one word at a time. She edited the anthologies EXPLETIVE DELETED and UNCAGE ME! and is the short story/special features editor for Crimespree Magazine.
She is currently hard at work breathing.